Forecasts for the worldwide agribotics market predict a whopping increase from $3 billion in 2015 to $16.3 billion by 2020.

The world’s population is expected to hit more than 9 billion by 2050. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. To grow all that food, the world’s farms will need to increase production by around 25 percent, according to a recent report from the World Resources Institute.

To make matters worse, experts expect shortages of water, fertilizer, and arable land to make it even more difficult to feed future generations.

At the same time, the number of people involved in the often dangerous world of agricultural labor is decreasing — an effect that is especially rapid in Europe and the United States.

The solution to automate agriculture as quickly as possible and as extensively as possible holds out the possibility that technology can help avert worldwide shortages of food in the coming decades.

Tom Green checks in with Frank Tobe, publisher of The Robot Report and founder of Robo-Global ETF, to assess the agricultural robotics landscape, future of automated farming, factory farms, agricultural drones, investing opportunities in automated farms and the way forward to increasing harvests enough to better feed the planet’s 7.5 billion people.

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